Memoirs of an Old Dyke

DEDICATION

This manuscript is dedicated to the

June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives

and the women whose personal efforts

keep the Mazer active and prominent

in preserving the history of our

lesbian community for

future generations.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forward

What’s In A Name? xv

A Note About Other Names xvii

PART 1

A Family Affair

Chapter 1 Bits and Pieces of the Very Early Years

Chapter 2 My Non-Existing Brother

Chapter 3 The Skeleton In the Closet

Chapter 4 Mama, Dear Mama

Chapter 5 Family and Lesbianism

Chapter 6 My Other Brother

Chapter 7 My Only High School Friend

PART 2

Significant Events of My Younger Life

Chapter 8 Precocious? You Think?

Chapter 9 The Lesson of Mrs Padfield

Chapter 10  My Childhood Contribution to World War II

Chapter 11 The Broken Window Incident

Chapter 12 A Rose Is a Rose

Chapter 13 My Friendly Tree, the Deodar

Chapter 14 Why I Hate Cow’s Milk!

Chapter 15 The Girls Athletic Association

Chapter 16 What Is A Poet?

PART 3

The Air Force Years

Chapter 17 We’re Off To See the World! (Or Not)

Chapter 18 The Ups and Downs of Basic Training

Chapter 19 March Air Force Base: First Assignment (Too Close To Home)

Chapter 20  Offutt Air Force Base: The Tribulations of Growing Up Fast

Chapter 21 The Men In My Life

Chapter 22 Welcome To Germany: First Chance to See The World

Chapter 23 Erding Air Depot: My Home Away from Home

Chapter 24 My First Lover (Finally!)

Chapter 25 Sports In the Military

Chapter 26 Gloria

Chapter 27 Travel and Art In Europe

Chapter 28 An Off the Base Discovery

Chapter 29 The Rest of My Air Frce Tour

Part 4

Life Post the Military

Chapter 30 Arriving Back Home After Four Years

Chapter 31 Virginia and Back to School

Chapter 32 The Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering

Chapter 33 Early Bar Experiences

Chapter 34 The Air Force Reserve

Chapter 35 Sherry

Chapter 36 Jo To My Rescue!

Chapter 37 The Python Incident

Chapter 38 Wendy: They’re Off and Running!

Chapter 39 My Major Intolerances

Chapter 40 Donna and Life Spring

Part 5

The Lesbian News Story

Chapter 41 The Saga of The Lesbian News Begins

Chapter 42 The Lesbian Activists Form

Chapter 43 The Lesbian News is Born

Chapter 44 A Note About Being Paid

Chapter 45 Looking Back, Looking Forward

Part 6

Activities and Observations

Chapter 46 A Brief Introduction To This Section

Chapter 47 N.O.W. & The Lesbian Rights Task Force

Chapter 48 Take Back the Night and Other Fallacies

Chapter 49 Male Privilege

Chapter 50  S&M and Violence Against Women

Chapter 51 Mort Sahl’s Call for Genocide

Chapter 52 Separatism or Self Determination?

Chapter 53 The Gay/Straight Conflict

Part 7

The Later Years

Chapter 54 Alicia and Fantasies Unlimited

Chapter 55 Cheating Death or Just Wanting to Live?

Chapter 56 My Desire To Be a Writer

Chapter 57 The Attempt At Lesbian Short Fiction

Chapter 58 My Last Job!

Conclusion

Addendum Poems

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to

Wendy Averill and Marilee France.

Without their support, love,

and encouragement

this manuscript would never

have been completed.

Additional thanks to

Linda Shinn

for her comments, as well as reading

and editing expertise.

FORWARD

As I write this memoir I have no idea what will ever be done with it, if anything. I’m not writing in any particular order, either within or between categories, however I have ordered the sections in what I considered a logical manner. The chapters definitely overlap. I don’t do this to confuse the reader, but to allow myself the freedom to write what pops into my mind at the moment.

I started writing about my memories when I was in my early sixties and have spent several years on it, taking time out in the middle to flirt with death. As I finish the manuscript I’m approaching my seventy-fifth birthday. For all practical purposes the story is complete, although I reserve the right to add anything new that might happen in the future up to my death, and I give permission to anyone who wishes to add a prologue concerning my demise.

Why have I written my memoir? Maybe I wrote it for my own ego or a justification of having lived. Or perhaps there is someone out there who is interested in reading about an old dyke who has been out of her personal closet since 1955 when she was twenty-two years old, well over fifty years ago. It was an astounding and difficult time, before there was a gay and lesbian movement.

I don’t claim to be a particularly exceptional person or lesbian. Indeed, I think I was pretty run-of-the-mill for a time filled with emerging lesbian heroines. Still, I did participate in the gay/lesbian movement of the 1970s and ‘80s, called the second wave by historian Barbara Love. The real beginning of the movement is left to history, like Sappho, Gertrude Stein, and Ann Bannon to name but a few from different eras who I consider more important.

As each generation before me, I’ve been written off by the generation that came after me. That’s OK, because much of what I and hundreds of lesbians of my age accomplished laid the base for what followed. If, as you read this, you have the freedom to be yourself wherever and whenever you wish, it is because the lesbians who came before you opened doors so you could step through without harm, physically or emotionally. I have seen lesbians come from not being able to walk down the street without being stopped by the police, to lesbians who’ve won the right to marry in some states. It took women seventy years to win the right to vote and lesbians and gays have won the right to marry in less than half the time!

Although I participated in several aspects of the lesbian/gay movement in Los Angeles, my biggest achievement was founding The Lesbian News. Born in controversy within our community, it was a major undertaking for which I’m very proud. I cannot tell you how many lesbians have thanked me and assured me the LN assisted them in their coming out process and in finding others of their sexual orientation. I have been given several awards for my work with the LN, including being named a Feminist Who Changed America. However the most important item I received was an unsigned postcard that simply said, Thank you for being there. I framed it, put it on my wall and have cherished it for over twenty five years.

You can find my story of founding The Lesbian News, which has now existed for more than thirty years, elsewhere in this manuscript. So, too, you can find memories of my childhood, recollections of my time in the military, my general life experiences as an adult, and some activities in the community as well as personal observations and opinions.

If indeed you are reading this memoir, I want you to understand this is not an exhausting autobiography (much of which would be terribly boring), but memories I hope will give you some insight to who I am as a life-long lesbian, one who believes I was a lesbian in the womb.

What’s In A Name?

I guess I should get the story of my name out there right off the bat. Yes, Jinx Beers is my legal name, and no, I wasn’t born with it.

You need to understand that for more than fifty years I’ve refused to tell anyone what my first name was. It’s not that there was anything wrong with the name; I’ve known women with the same name who were wonderful and the name fit them perfectly. It just never fit me. Besides there’s more to the story than that when your mother wouldn’t even call you by your first name!

I was the fifth of five children. My mother told me later in life she was determined I wasn’t going to be named after any relative as the other four had been. She said she asked my dad to give her a list of names he liked. She named me Clara Jean Beers, and said Clara was the best of the names my dad had listed, but she got to pick the middle name. However, no one ever called me Clara. I grew up being called Jean and consider it a perfectly good name.

My sister Virginia was nine years older than me (and the next one up in age). When she was teaching Sunday School at about seventeen, and I was eight, she and I used to write poems for her young students. Just to lend a bit of mystery to the poems we would sign them Ginnie and her jinx. Soon she began to call me her Jinx, eventually dropped the her, and I became Jinx to her. To my parents I was still Jean.

The year I was born must have been a good year for the name Jean. Because, a few years after my sister began to call me Jinx, I entered a health education class in high school and found there were five students in the class named Jean. That was it, I permanently became Jinx. Even as a teenager I didn’t want to be like everyone else.

When I was eighteen I joined the Air Force, but of course they wouldn’t let me join under my taken name. For four years I went through my regular service under my legal name, but everyone called me Jinx. After I was discharged, I decided to go to court and make Jinx legal. I was in the Air Force Reserve at that time and a young, inexperience attorney in my reserve unit said he’d represent me for a very reasonable fee. He also advised me that if I ever intended to own property, I should do the name change first to eliminate future problems.

On the designated day we entered a courtroom of people and families wanting to change their names. We didn’t rate a judge; we were assigned a commissioner authorized to do this minor kind of legal stuff. First he spent a half hour wasting time asking each attorney how much time he needed, and chastising any attorney who said he needed more than a couple of minutes. Each case was then called individually.

First up was a family consisting of husband, wife and small child who wanted to change their last name from Rosenberg to Rose. The commissioner asked the husband why he wanted to change his name, and was told, For business purposes. The commissioner spent the next ten minutes chastising Mr. Rosenberg for wanting to change a perfectly good name. By law all you have to do is swear you’re not taking a new name for fraudulent purposes. The commissioner, still fuming, had no choice but to grant the name change request. This should have been a warning to me.

Eventually my case came up before the commissioner, and my attorney and I stepped up to the bench. The commissioner read my petition and said: "You want to change your first name from Clara Jean to Jinx? He looked up at me, apparently unhappy, and said in a very loud voice,Is this a joke? Are you trying to be funny in my courtroom?" I answered no, it wasn’t a joke. He chastised me for a while and finally went through the process of making me swear I wasn’t changing my name for fraudulent purposes, and granted my petition.

One of the problems about having an inexperienced attorney is he wasn’t able to think quickly. He stood there with his mouth open and said nothing. He never said a word until we were out of the courthouse. I’d like to think he was at least a little embarrassed about not speaking up for my petition before the commissioner.

It took my father many years to call me Jinx. Not because he objected, but because he wouldn’t remember I’d changed my name. In the next few years he would be proud of himself when he remembered to call me Jinx. The rest of my family took to it pretty quickly.

There is one interesting aspect about being named Jinx, and that’s the reaction of other people upon first being introduced. Over the years I’ve realized I get one of two distinct responses. About twenty-five percent do a double take and make some comment about my being a jinx. That is, they view the name in a negative way. But three-quarters of the people I meet react in a positive manner, commenting the name is cute, or unusual. Since I received the name Jinx in a positive way, I think of it positively, and assume those who do not simply view life in the negative. That’s their problem, not mine.

Throughout the world there are duplicate names in every language. How many Mary Smiths? How many Sean O’Connors? How many Mohammad Amirs? I don’t know, but I’d bet you no where in this world is there another person named Jinx Beers!

A Note About Other Names

As to the names of the people mentioned in my memoir, in most cases the names I use are real, but limited to first names. Only those in my very closest circle would be able to recognize them. The few times I’ve used actual names are incidences that are public record, not just my recollection.

I have no intention of hurting anyone’s feelings. However in a couple of vignettes I do write about behavior that might be embarrassing, albeit truthful. My intent is to write about myself and how the relationship affected me. But, for example, how am I going to explain how living with an alcoholic enlightened me without saying she had a drinking problem? In this case I don’t even use a first name.

I have attempted to be circumspect when writing about others and included only the history required to speak about myself. If I failed in this effort at all, I apologize in advance.

PART 1

A FAMILY AFFAIR

1

Bits and Pieces of the Very Early Years

Born in the worst part of the Great Depression on Columbus Day, October 12, 1933 about 5:25 pm at the Women’s Hospital on North Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena, California, it became clear to me at an early age I was a mistake. My parents had two boys followed by two girls in the first six years of their marriage. My mother was seventeen when she wed, but she had finished high school. Nine years after her fourth child, I arrived at a most inopportune time. My mother was thirty-two.

My older sister, Anne, who was eleven years my senior took care of me most of the time. Later in our lives we frequently talked about the fact that she raised me more than my mom, until she went off after WWII and got married. Consequently, it’s no surprise that of all my family I grew closer to her than anyone else.

Anne turned out to be significantly taller and larger than I was, and until her passing at age eighty, she called me her baby sister. She was a serious and dedicated person. Her husband contracted multiple sclerosis in his mid-twenties, slowly deteriorating over the next forty years. Anne’s dedication to taking care of him was astronomical in my opinion. Despite his personal dislike of me, my sister never suggested I wasn’t welcome in her home. Not only did she take care of me when I was little, but protected me from knowing about the unspoken actions of my family until I was in my mid-thirties. Only once in eighty years did she pull back from me, but that was because she didn’t like the person I was living with, and had little, or nothing, to do with me personally. Until her death I considered her a port in the storm if I ever needed one.

I actually have few memories before age six, except a few disconnected flashes. I remember being on welfare for a while and watching boxes of food staples being delivered to the kitchen and my mother being embarrassed, but accepting it. I want to remember riding on the back of our Shepard dog, King, who was very patient with me (I must have been very young for him to withstand my weight), but I suspect I’m remembering only because I was told it happened. We lived in Temple City during at that time. Do I remember riding my tricycle at about age three? No, I think that is only a memory of a picture. There was also a picture of me with King in the back of a stake truck, but I don’t think I remember the actual event.

I do have distinct memories of living across from a dairy and alongside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks in El Monte. I would stand on our front porch and wave to the engineers as they went by. Most would wave back. There was a period where I would write down the engine numbers and knew about when each engine was due. For the rest of my life I’ve had a high interest in trains and model railroading, but not particularly in cows (although I love the cow ads for California cheese).

At that same residence there was an old silo and one of my brothers, Roy, would sleep there. One night there was a storm and the silo split open and fell down. My brother was totally uninjured; the silo had fallen out away from where he was sleeping. Also there, my mother would buy goat’s milk from the landlady. The goat ate whatever weeds she could find. The milk tasted just awful, but I was forced to drink it anyway.

Then there was the first day of a new school when we moved to Monrovia. It must have been kindergarten. I cried and cried and cried because I had left my lunch at home. Finally the teacher gave in and let me go back home for it and return to school. I was fine from then on.

When we moved back to Pasadena I was six years old and it was there I had my first romance with Gwendolyn, the little girl who lived across the street. We used to play house, and of course I was always the man-of-the-house and a doll was our child.

Most people have many memories going much farther back than I do. Mine are very limited. I believe I’ve blocked out that time because of a traumatic experience concerning my brother Roy when I was six.

2

My Non-Existing Brother

They tell me I once had a brother named Roy. Actually, his name was Lawrence Clifford, but after his birth certificate was signed, my father decided he was going to be named Roy. Too late officially, but it’s what he was called for the rest of his life.

Which wasn’t all that long.

Roy committed suicide when he was nineteen..

My sister Anne told me that Roy and I were buddies. When he was home, he would play with me, carry me around on his shoulders and generally make it obvious he loved me. I was six when he died; he was thirteen years older.

I know he existed because I have one picture of him, taken not too long before he died, sitting on a rock and holding a snake strung between his hands. However, I have absolutely no memory of him, only his funeral.

He committed suicide by jumping off the bridge into the Devil’s Gate Dam in Pasadena. Back in those days there actually was water in the